Every letter is its own piece of writing. Budget roughly 10 to 15 minutes of human time to write each one, plus about 2 minutes to queue it. The machine's writing time runs unattended, so you may not count it against your own hours.
Mail merged but still personal: "Hi Sally — how do you feel about X? I would love to do Y with you." The machine takes the same time per letter, but the human time is one setup job: about 1 hour whether n is fifty or a thousand, plus whatever it takes to prepare the name list. Per letter, that is 1 hour divided by the batch size.
The same letter, printed again and again. The human time equals writing one unique letter (about 15 minutes, once) plus the one-time setup; after that a reprint costs only minutes to queue. Per letter, that is 15 minutes divided by the whole print run. Good for short thank-you notes sent to many places.
"Size" = the height of one character — the font's full em box, capital top to descender tail (like a Word font size, but in mm; 5.0 mm ≈ 14 pt). Line-to-line distance = size × line spacing. Click a row to use it.
| Char height | Fits? | Lines | Words / line |
|---|
Recorded 2026-08-12 while timing the FarmKind Dear Geoffrey letter on yellow A5 (half sheet), hand 34. Master copy in Em's vault machine note.
Pen up 4 · pen down 8 · installation pen position 7. Empty travel enabled (pen up position 0, threshold 10 mm). Offsets: horizontal −5, vertical −55. Multiple feed: 2.
Resolution ratio: Resolution. Speed Custom: writing 1500, movement 1000. Unit: inches. Image limit 4000 px · tool size 0.3 mm · connection timeout 5 · automatic connection on, reconnect off · complete pop-up on, prompt sound off.
Add left/right of character: 0/0. Baseline 100. Random float up/down: about the 4th notch. Number of amplitudes 1, squiggle 2. Initial random placement 0. Character width automatic. Nib: none, 0/0.
Random size 95–100 · random spacing 95–100 · random tilt −5 to 5 · random vertical stretch 95–100 · random horizontal stretch 95–100.
Angular strength ≈ 20% · length strength ≈ 33–35% · performance ≈ 25%.
8 min writing + ~20 s page change = 8 min 20 s per 422-character half-sheet letter (0.88 characters per second; minutes ≈ characters ÷ 53).
Pens like the Uni-ball Eye (UB-157) work particularly well in the machine. The colour swatches on the page are close approximations of the real inks.
There is a lot we can do to play with how the ink works. Ink bleed, for example, adds an element of realism — real rollerball ink pools and feathers slightly on real paper, and no laser printer does that.
Ink flow is also the real speed limit: push the machine faster than the pen can feed ink and the strokes go thin and scratchy. The splotches are part of what makes it look human.
Do you need to tell people you used dictation software? Do you need to tell people when you got feedback on a note before sending it? Probably not — and yet a machine-penned letter can feel like a bigger question.
The truth underneath: these letters come from a place of care. The machine is how one person's care reaches more people, not a way to fake care that is not there.
If disclosure feels right, a warm PS does it. The "Add a PS" button under your letter offers honest wordings, for example: "By the way, I used a machine to help pen this."
You need one technically capable staff member for the global setup, and one machine operator per postal jurisdiction — one wherever letters get mailed from.
Mailing across borders is possible but adds cost and delay, so it is rarely worth it. You could even park a machine near a border and have the operator carry the letters across to mail them. Possible; not wise.
The more novel a medium, the more memorable it is. No one prints out an email, sticks it on their fridge, and looks at it more than once. That happens with letters.
A letter demonstrates care, and people pay attention to care. There is research on this, but you do not need a single citation to feel it: why do people still handwrite birthday cards?
And this is not a new trick. Political parties, fundraisers, lobbyists, tutors, philosophers and artists have leaned on letters for centuries — because they get opened, kept, and answered.
Now think about where email is heading. How do you imagine people will respond to email once every email is obviously written by an AI? A premium lands on communication with a human touch. It matters now. It is about to matter much more.
A fitting room for machine-penned letters: will the words fit the page, what will they look like, how long will the machine take, and what will each letter cost.
The height of one character — the font's full em box, capital top to descender tail, like a Word font size but in millimetres. 5.0 mm ≈ 14 pt. The written strokes sit a little smaller inside that box.
Calibrated from a real timed run on 2026-08-12: a 422-character half-sheet letter took 8 minutes of writing plus 20 seconds of page change. If the machine's speed settings change, re-time one page and update the numbers in the machine-speed dialog.
The bottom 25 mm of the page is where the paper can slip out of the machine mid-letter. Writing there risks a ruined sheet.
The paper system, the envelope, and the postage default. The United States and Canada write on Letter (8.5 × 11 in) and Half letter (5.5 × 8.5 in); the United Kingdom and Germany both use A4 and A5.
Every country has a discounted bulk or nonprofit tier — the 💸 button in the cost calculator switches to it and explains what it takes (volume minimums, presorting, or nonprofit authorization).
The Uni-ball Eye (UB-157) family — see the pens dialog for why, and for what ink can do.
That is your call — see the "should you tell people?" dialog. The "Add a PS" button offers honest wordings if disclosure feels right.
Ask Em: em@ponders.us